


the sun and her flowers (are here)

by green_tea31



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, M/M, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 11:21:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21848857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/green_tea31/pseuds/green_tea31
Summary: Desi is met by a nervous young man at LAX who tries to take her bag and introduces himself only as “Bozer, nice to meet you. I’m an old friend of Mac’s.” She keeps a tight grip on her bag and lets him lead her to a dark red jeep while trying not to think about this Mac – this kid who has intruded into her and Jack’s life in a way she isn’t entirely comfortable with.Despite their inability to stay together, it’s been just her and Jack for so long that she can’t quite supress the jealousy threatening to well up whenever she imagines a young, brilliant EOD tech finding his way into Jack’s heart without even trying.(In a world where soulmates have matching marks on their wrists, Desi and Jack don't quite fit together. It takes the addition of a blue-eyed genius to get them the happy ending they deserve.)
Relationships: Angus MacGyver/Desiree "Desi" Nguyen, Jack Dalton/Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), Jack Dalton/Angus MacGyver/Desiree "Desi" Nguyen, Jack Dalton/Desiree "Desi" Nguyen
Comments: 31
Kudos: 128





	the sun and her flowers (are here)

**Author's Note:**

> I've put writing macdalton on hold for a while because I had to finish my bachelor's thesis by mid December which is now done, so I can go back to the - ahem - important things in life. Next up is working on my WIPs, but this little story wanted to be written first. I may expand on it one day, definitely going to write more Jack/Mac/Desi in the future, but for now it's done. Will also start answering your comments again. I cherish every single one of them so very much, but lately I just didn't have the energy to write responses. 
> 
> As always self-betaed. All mistakes are my own.
> 
> Title from a poem by Rupi Kaur.

Desi and Jack find each other at what is perhaps the least opportune moment in both of their lives. Their first meeting is framed by a cacophony of gunfire and screaming. Jack Dalton and his team drop into the little hideout Desi and the other survivor of her team have spent the past two days trying to survive in like a veritable army of ghosts – silent, deadly and without mercy. Desi isn’t entirely sure she hallucinates the entire rescue until she wakes up at Ramstein Air Base with a cranky Texan at her bedside, doing his best to drive the nurses absolutely crazy.

Jack doesn’t say anything to her when she first opens her eyes, just rolls up his sleeve so she can see the soulmark matching hers on his wrist, the lines drawn starkly against his skin.

“I’m…,” Desi tries to say something, but her voice breaks with days of silence and the lingering ache of the harsh desert sand thick in her throat. Jack grabs an ice chip from a nearby cup and the coolness of it is a relief that she hadn’t dared to hope for anymore, trapped as they’d been with only a small amount of lukewarm water remaining. Her soulmate’s fingers linger at her lips for a moment, and Desi barely resists the urge to nip at his thumb, warmth fluttering somewhere deep in her belly.

_This might just work,_ she thinks giddily before falling asleep again.

It doesn’t.

It’s – to put it _mildly_ – an unmitigated disaster. Jack hasn’t just saved her life, he also kind of saves her career afterwards. The clusterfuck in the desert wasn’t actually her fault, but she’s a woman in a place that many of her fellow soldiers still resent her for occupying in the first place, and the only survivor to boot. Desi will never be entirely sure what Jack did during the weeks she spent recovering in the hospital, but by the time she’s released none of her superiors talk about blaming her for the incident anymore.

That, however, is not the problem between her and Jack.

They’re well matched from the outside – both of them very good at their jobs and deadly in a way that few ever manage to achieve. And that’s what ultimately proves to be their downfall, because Desi and Jack are just _too_ similar.

Stubborn, prideful and independent. Too used to getting their own way. Too used to being the one doing the _protecting_ instead of being protected. They spend three months together, and after a tentative first week of getting to know each other, most of that time is spend in a haze of fighting or fucking. They have enough chemistry between them to set fire to half of Texas, but it’s the same fire that’s going to burn them to the ground if they’re not careful enough.

Desi wakes up one morning, the bed a mess, dried come itchy on her thighs, and finds Jack regarding her with a knowing expression.

“This ain’t gonna work, darlin’. Not like this.” She squeezes her eyes shut and buries her face in Jack’s throat, refusing to let the tears fall. Her soulmate’s scent is warm and comforting and she tries to take in as much as she can because he’s right. They can’t go on like this.

“Fuck,” she mumbles into Jack’s skin. His arm comes up around her and she rolls them over until his body is covering hers. If this is their end Desi will make sure to take as many memories with her as she can.

“Des,” Jack begins but there’s little protest in his voice and she can feel his hardness nudging at her. She arches up, her legs trapping him between her thighs. Jack groans into her mouth, kissing her with a feverish determination that speaks of the same loss she feels weighing her down, and when he slips inside her body, Desi knows, deep within her heart, that she won’t get to experience this feeling of completeness again for a very long time – if ever.

…

She doesn’t see Jack in person for the next few years. They stay in contact. No matter their incompatibility, both of them still feel drawn to each other – she can see the yearning in Jack’s eyes whenever they feel masochistic enough for a video call.

They spend the years being busy around the world. Desi gets promoted, gets involved in another clusterfuck of epic proportions and loses whatever vestiges of idealism she’s had left. Jack joins the CIA, gets involved in his own clusterfuck and re-joins the Army to serve out his remaining years watching over EOD technicians. Nothing really changes, and Desi has almost managed to push the feeling of loss whenever she thinks of Jack into the farthest reaches of her mind, when she gets the oddest phone call she’s ever received from her soulmate.

At three in the morning.

“So help me Dalton. If you’re not currently dying I’m going to hunt you down and make you pay for waking me up in the middle of the night.” Yes – she’s always cranky in the night and Jack should really know that by now.

The only thing she hears over the line for a few moments is silence and Jack’s oddly excited breathing and then a sound that can only be described as…giggling.

Desi is worried now, because Jack Dalton doesn’t _giggle_.

“Desi – shit. I forgot you’re halfway around the world, but – _listen_.” Jack’s rambling comes to a halt and Desi can make out a faint voice in the background.

“’S alright. Just an old friend. Go back to sleep kid,” Jack says to whoever is with him and Desi’s stomach clenches uncomfortably with a feeling that’s entirely too much like jealousy for her to be comfortable with.

“Jack?” She asks and he chuckles roughly.

“Sorry Des. Look – I know I’m not making much sense right know, but you need to come to LA as soon as possible.”

Desi feels her muddled thoughts come to a sudden halt. “What?”

“Yeah – sounds crazy right? But I’m pretty sure I found our third.” 

…

Only a small percent of the world's population actually ever finds their soulmate, which isn’t surprising given that there’s more than seven billion potential partners to choose from, and so a relatively small percentage of each generation actually manages to find the one person carrying a matching mark on their wrist. The people who have more than one person matching their own?

Needless to say those are often subject to legend – the chance of ever finding all members of a triad so abysmally low that even the most famous of these matches – King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot – nearly ended in tragedy.

Most of them never manage at all, and even if two members of the triad find each other, there will always be a gap, a place that remains unfilled, a gap too wide to bridge. Nearly all unfinished triads end before they even really begin.

…

Desi is met by a nervous young man at LAX who tries to take her bag and introduces himself only as “Bozer, nice to meet you. I’m an old friend of Mac’s.” She keeps a tight grip on her bag and lets him lead her to a dark red jeep while trying not to think about this Mac – this kid who has intruded into her and Jack’s life in a way she isn’t entirely comfortable with.

Despite their inability to stay together, it’s been just her and Jack for so long that she can’t quite supress the jealousy threatening to well up whenever she imagines a young, brilliant EOD tech finding his way into Jack’s heart without even trying.

Bozer drives them through the insanity that is LA traffic with a steadiness that speaks of experience, and it isn’t long until they pull into the driveway of a very nice mid-century home that should be too expensive for a former soldier and whatever Bozer does to make a living.

“It belonged to Mac’s grandfather,” Bozer says next to her, seemingly reading her thoughts. She smiles at him, more of a grimace really, and follows him into the house. Jack grins when he sees her, hugging her with the energy of an overexcited puppy.

She hasn’t realized, until just now, how much she _missed_ him, and so she hangs on a little too long, but Jack doesn’t seem to mind.

“Hey,” Jack says, eyes warm and fond. “I want you to meet someone.”

He turns and grabs her hand, dragging her out onto a wooden deck where a tall, blond _boy_ is nervously wringing his hands together.

He might be younger than they are, but even then he is beautiful. It won’t take her long to understand that he’s as beautiful on the inside as he is on the outside, and by then she’ll be entirely too lost to even want to get out of this triad of theirs anymore.

For now, Mac extends his hand and there on his wrist is the proof she’s been unconsciously looking for, the skin around the mark a pale band, he’s been covering it then. He smiles uncertainly and Desi takes his hand into hers, turning her arm slightly so he can see the mark on her wrist as well.

“Hi,” he says, his voice darker than she imagined. “I’m Mac.” He takes a deep breath before continuing, “I think I’ve been waiting for you for a really long time.” He glances at Jack and there’s a wealth of emotion in his eyes that she can’t quite decipher yet. “Both of you.”

Desi looks into earnest, blue – too blue eyes really, and throws whatever caution remains in her heart into the wind, because apparently Jack went to the desert and found them a goddamn golden retriever puppy to take care of. A wounded, good-looking, entirely too earnest golden retriever puppy, but still. She’s never been all that attracted to the California surfer boy type before, but it’s like someone has taken every little thing that will push her buttons and formed them into this helpless little genius. Desi steps forward and cups Mac’s face between her hands, pressing a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth. Somehow that action feels as intimate as every single night she and Jack have spent tumbling the sheets together, and dammit, this might actually work.

…

It works. It works so beautifully, after a few weeks of living in the house with Mac and Jack, of sharing living space, of just being together, she almost can’t remember what life felt like without them anymore.

Mac is wounded, still. There’s a deep seated pain buried in those baby blues that’s not all Afghanistan, some of it goes deeper, back to a childhood that he will tell them about someday. The war is there too, but Desi and Jack have experience with that kind of hurt, and it isn’t long before Mac’s smiles get a little brighter and his nightmares become a weekly event instead of an almost daily occurrence.

With Mac completing them, Desi and Jack find that they fit together a lot better than they used to. Mac gives both of them a person to protect, even if Jack is a lot more obvious about it. Mac might protest that he’s a former soldier himself and able to take care of himself, but there’s a shy little smile on his face whenever Desi and Jack do something to take care of him, to put him first.

Somehow, she doubts he’s often had people putting him first – sometimes it seems like Mac can’t actually believe that he’s worth that much, worth that much effort, and it makes her want to find everyone who has ever hurt him like that and show them the error of their ways. Jack feels the same way. They make a list one night, after one to many beers, that Bozer destroys the next morning, but the sentiment stays. Mac is theirs now and woe to anyone who dares to hurt him.

He’s even more beautiful when he accepts what they want to give him. Sex with Mac becomes less of the near fighting she and Jack had engaged in back in the day, and more of what Desi secretly likes to think is the kind of picture perfect harmony soulmates are supposed to have between them. It’s still messy and real, but she loves it like this. Mac on his side, wrapped up in Jack’s arms who takes him from behind with deep even thrusts while Desi, still sore from having Mac eat her out for what felt like an hour earlier, presses gentle kisses to Mac’s skin. Her fingers flick over his sensitive nipples and the blissed-out look on Mac’s face becomes even more intense, something she didn’t think was possible. Desi shoots a wicked grin at Jack who nods into Mac’s hair, giving her the go-ahead.

By the time they’re finished with him, Mac won’t be able to sit straight for days without thinking about them.

Desi and Mac become partners in crime, discovering a mutual penchant for mayhem that Jack likes to complain about constantly, even if he is right behind them most of the time, trying, and failing, to be a somewhat mitigating influence. But that’s alright too, because Jack smiles a lot more than he used to these days.

Still – their quiet life of living in Mac’s house, using up whatever money they had left, trying to find employment when most of their collective skillset falls under the category of redacted, comes to a sudden halt on a sunny Friday morning under the watchful eyes of Patricia Thornton, who seems to have more than just a passing interest in Mac.

“I’m sorry?” Jack’s voice is a little incredulous which is understandable given that his resignation from the life of a covert operative is rumoured to have been quite spectacular.

Thornton smiles, undeterred. Her eyes never leaving Mac who idly traces the grain of the kitchen counter with his fingers, seemingly lost in thought.

Desi isn’t fooled. Mac is just as attentive to the conversation as the rest of them.

“Mr MacGyver has been on my shortlist of recruits for some time now, and since both of his soulmates come with prior training and experience, I thought this might be the right time to approach all of you,” Thornton says.

Desi grits her teeth. She might appreciate the fact that Thornton approached all of them together and didn’t try to talk to Mac without them there to back him up, but she really doesn’t like the reminder that people like Patricia Thornton have, at best, only a vaguely appropriate concept of privacy. She glances at Jack and finds him watching Mac with a look of amused resignation in his eyes.

Yeah – she noticed it too. Mac is definitely interested.

Jack glances back at her and she gives him an almost imperceptible nod. Might as well use their skills for something productive, and the DXS seems a lot less shady than the CIA at least.

Mac looks at them and smiles, reading them like the open books they have never been. Whatever happens next – they’re in this together.

…

_The first time she watches Jack hand Mac a paperclip to give his fidgeting hands something to do, Desi laughs for almost a minute straight, because she’s always wondered about the odd shape of their soulmark. She starts carrying paperclips too – Mac’s hands will never be empty again if she can help it._


End file.
